


But That Which Is Only Living Can Only Die

by wormwood700



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 02:58:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12448260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wormwood700/pseuds/wormwood700
Summary: Éowyn, Merry, the ride of the Rohirrim and the stubborn nature of hope.Gap filler, book-verse.





	But That Which Is Only Living Can Only Die

**By Morning She'll Ride**

Éowyn fed the brazier with handfuls of honey-coloured hair. The stink seemed to her a foretaste of what was to come. Even when the longest hair-strands littered the ground around her, she'd continued to cut. Kept the scissors close to the skull-bone, sheared every bit of hair as short as she was able. When she was done her head felt light and empty, like a dried seed-pod.It became a little easier to breathe. The blood-bitter taste of rejection receded.

Her blustering, informal words, the inside-out of her heart had been flicked aside with cordiality wrapped around icy formality. With soft platitudes about the invaluable, even-if-unsung contributions of the silent and humble. She'd been rejected by a man who'd turned out to be another than she thought he was : squirming, bothered – fallible.

_And I would have followed you, my love..._

Somewhere a faint rain-rush voice whispered that perhaps she'd never been in love with the real man, just her own elevated image of him. Love nurtured in loneliness, reflecting only her own dreams and grief. Love unable to stand much reality.

She ignored it.

By morning the Rohirrim would ride. Through the strange granular murk that had descended; towards the crimson band that rimmed the horizon and shouldered the dark. A band growing thinner by the day.

By morning she would ride, cloaked in and rubbed out by the same granular murk. Becoming just another head, another warrior, another set of arms and legs in the folds of the Rohirrim.

A draft from the tent door tickled her bare neck.

A memory-sting; a deep, hot pinprick in the mind: Morwen blowing loose hair away from her nape. A nit-invasion, more persistent than usual. In exasperation Morwen decided it wasn't worth the trouble to save Éowyn's hair and cut it off. 'It's more where it came from.' Afterwards she attacked the remaining strands vigorously with the nit-comb.

Then love was easy: artless, encompassing, unquestioning and unashamed.

Éowyn rubbed away the wetness pooling at the corner of her eyes. Tomorrow the Rohirrim would ride towards the White City. Morwen's city. Once that would have mattered. Now the action of riding towards it was a means of catching up with death rather than wait for death to catch up with her.

Before morning Éowyn poured water on the brazier and the hair-ash within it. She rubbed some ash into her cheeks and hair and covered the short strands with a knitted cap. She gathered her weapons and equipment and walked out. A slight figure, but straight and supple. She carried her head with great care, as if she still was getting used to it.

**Holloway**

The wain-road had been cut into the rock and forgotten, as happens to some roads. Over the centuries the trees moved in. They stretched themselves thin to reach the light and fresh air above the edge of the stone, keeping close to the rock wall. Now they lined the wide path in front of them on both sides, curving in towards each-other like facing regiments of long wrists and hands, fingertips touching.

Éowyn looked down at the hobbit. The horse's movements made his curly head bob against the line of her flattened breasts. Merry threw her a glance across his shoulder and their eyes met. His was the same gaze as before, concerned, acknowledging, accepting. She felt the look was for her. That he saw something in her eyes she would have wanted to hide had it been someone else.

The morning before the ride, when she'd seen the small, hooded figure watching the preparations in rigid silence, she'd known he would ride with her. The same way she knew she would ride. The hobbit had never seen her up close, she'd kept a distance. The truth was that the contrast between his child stature and adult face and eyes unnerved her. Now that seemed to belong to another time, another state of mind entirely.

'Wain-road, greenway, bradway, shute, herepath, corpseway...' Merry half spoke, half hummed to himself.

'Corpseway' - that may turn out to be fitting.' Éowyn voiced what was meant to remain a thought, and bit her lip.

Merry looked up into the vaulted lattice just above their heads. Rust-coloured light fell in through holes in the mesh and stained the ground. Spider-webs hung down like hammocks and ripped as they caught on hair, helmets and weapons.

'Maybe,' he said, 'maybe none in this long winding line of horses and men will return. Then again, spaces open where you least expect them. You, sharing your horse with me. The solitary wood-men, who are neither friend nor foe showing us this hidden road, forgotten by all but them. If Death stops for me, she stops, but until then I won't part with hope.'

'Hope I find far easier to travel without. She takes up far too much room.'

A large white and black bird flapped gracelessly up in front of them, shedding feathers as it scrambled for a branch to land on. Éowyn leant forward to calm the horse. Merry felt her chin stretched out across his hair, his back contained within the line of her body.

'Perhaps you would accept a piece of mine then. It's light and fragile and fits easily into your pocket.'

'A piece of hope for my pocket....'

From somewhere far off Éowyn heard herself laugh. A rain-rush laugh, barely audible above the surrounding hoof-hit.

'My pocket may turn out to be full of holes, Mr. Hobbytla, but I accept.'

Merry smiled into the murk. His mood lifted a little. He marvelled at the never faltering trust between the horses and the riders, the graceful control of the men. A skill honed over centuries, inherent as breathing.

He, she...Dernhelm, possessed it too...

But the White Lady of Rohan belonged to another time and place and he'd never known her. He only knew Dernhelm with his woollen cap and streaked face. Only once had the hat been removed, briefly, within his field of vision. Merry had caught a glimpse of short, dirty uneven hair. In between the strands were white, almost bald patches, as if the hair had been torn out.

And Dernhelm was the one who had let him ride, not the pale, remote woman they'd left behind. Dernhelm with the calm eyes of one who travels without any wish to return.

Éowyn felt a strange, clean emptiness almost like pleasure. The line of men and horses behind her and in front of her dwindled into shadow. The only tactile, physical things remaining were herself, the hobbit and the horse. The holloway was a lull, a calm before blood-shed. But perhaps also a slow re-awakening of a forever-ago dream of tying up loose ends, of mapping the landscape to better contain and unite the people within it.

As a girl she'd carried a dream of jumping off the map of her people. She used to curl her fingers into a tunnel in front of her eyes and watch the sky through the aperture. She wanted to contort, run along the bridge of her own nose and dive into the white- and blue-speckled yonder.

Now, with a kind of bitter insight, she understood that the dream and desire to connect, to love another, didn't let go so easily. She thought she'd cut all her ties to the world except for the pure fact of her still living, still breathing. Now she wasn't so sure.

Éowyn caught herself wishing the holloway would never end. That she would always ride, with a piece of shiny, untouched hope in her pocket. Rocking, the horse's head bobbing, towards eternity.

 


End file.
